using harvest moon porn to explain how book advances work

[crossposted from tumblr]

bear with me on this, it's a funny thought i had but might be of interest to anyone not familiar with traditional book publishing and how authors are usually paid.

i have an artbook coming out soon: Harvest Nude, a collection of erotic illustrations of characters from the harvest moon/story of seasons/rune factory series of games. i'd done around 13 of the illustrations myself, for fun, and then opened commissions to add pages to it. there are now 31 additional pages paid for by commissioners, at $90 a piece.

we are going to pretend those commissioners are, as a group, The Publisher. not counting tips/fees/taxes, The Publisher has paid me an advance of $2790 to produce this artbook. (we are going to also pretend that i'm getting a single up-front advance. in traditional publishing, you're more likely to get it split up into multiple payments on signing/delivery/release)

so that is what i'm paid. when the book is out and released, the publisher gets all the profit up until the point the book "earns out". what that means is that the book will have earned an equivalent amount in sales to what The Publisher paid me: $2790. if the book never makes this much money, i'll never see another cent more than that initial $2790.

at $5 a copy (again ignoring fees, taxes, tips) the book would need to sell 558 copies. if it does do this, then i start earning royalties. royalties are a percentage of all future sales, usually in the ballpark of 10%. from that point on, until the book goes completely out of print, i would receive a check twice a year for whatever that amounts to. depending on the size of your advance, this can take years to happen. for a lot of books, it never happens at all! the advance is all you get!

but... fortunately this is not the case. my commissioners are individuals buying a luxury product that they've given me permission to profit from. so actually, i've made $2790, and get to keep the proceeds of all future sales. which makes it funny that this book will almost certainly not hit the "earn out" threshold because the people who commissioned me get a free copy of the book, and they're the same audience that would have bought it. i will absolutely make more on the commissions than the book they're intended for.

hopefully this was educational on the subject of how advances and royalties work. and perhaps you would like to buy the book and contribute to it """"earning out."""" there are a lot of hot boys and girls in there.